Tom Salinsky

Oh god. If The Theory of Everything was bland then The Imitation Game is absolutely ghastly. Working with what is arguably a more compelling story, save that the central character’s failings are less conspicuous, it pours a high-gloss movie sheen over everything which almost completely obscures anything which might have been interesting about its central character or the events of his life.

The life of Turing is a bit easier to attack than the life of Hawking, from a structural point of view at least. Almost everything he did which is of interest to modern-day movie-goers, he did at Bletchley Park between 1939 and 1945, save for his prosecution for homosexuality in 1952 (or as the movie insists, 1951) and later suicide. Shamelessly ripping-off the excellent play and TV film Breaking the Code, with Derek Jacobi as Turing (both works cite Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma as a source but the new film doesn’t give playwright Hugh Whitemore even a sniff of a mention), the movie hops distractedly about through the same three different time zones (or four if you count the clunkingly melodramatic voice-over which keeps duplicating information given in dialogue) – Turing’s school days, his time at Bletchley and his investigation by Rory Kinnear’s honest Manchester copper.

Whereas Everything simply pretended that Hawking wasn’t a scientist at all for much of its running time, Imitation attempts to put Turing’s cryptanalysis front-and-centre but the rendition is laughably simplified to the point of near total ridicule. Knowing nothing about Turing’s life, a new viewer might conclude that he recruited young men and women who were crossword puzzle geniuses so that they could stand idly by and watch him build a code-cracking machine unaided which simple arithmetic would tell him is incapable or working fast enough to sort through all the possible combinations of German ciphers before they change them the next morning, but which he runs futilely every day until he is told for the second time that the Germans have a tendency to send similar messages on different days, whereupon the machine starts working and from that moment on decrypts all German coded messages without further intervention. Not only is none of that true, but most of it is absurd on its face.

Sitting at the centre of this mess is poor Benedict Cumberbatch, trying very hard to make sure no-one mistakes Turing for Sherlock. He certainly tries, giving donnish Turing a high, reedy voice with a slight lisp and none of Holmes’ demented swagger. It’s an attempt which is doomed to failure however, since the screenplay is so utterly determined to turn him into Sherlock in any case – historical veracity and internal logic be damned.

The supporting cast also show the same kind of bold outlines, bright colours and total lack of grace and subtlety, like that awful cartoon version of PG Wodehouse’s Blandings books on TV recently. Leading the way is the film’s sort-of love interest in the spindly form of Keira Knightley (fine) who solves Turing’s crossword puzzle test in three quarters of the time it takes him (why?), but thereafter restricts her involvement in the great work to being a winsome sounding board for the Eccentric Genius and having a vaguely unlikely (but possibly true) blasé attitude towards her fiancé’s homosexuality. Elsewhere, Graham Moore’s clunking screenplay manufactures a ridiculously blinkered baddie out of Cdr Denniston (whom Charles Dance somehow manages to play with a straight face), a smooth ally in Mark Strong’s General Menzies and a nice turn from Matthew Goode as Hugh Alexander.

For reasons which pass all understanding, the movie also finds it necessary to parachute in Soviet spy John Caincross as one of Turing’s colleagues, despite the fact that there is no evidence the two men ever met at Bletchley Park or anywhere else. But when we’re this far adrift from history – Christ, who cares anyway?

Look, I’m not saying that director Morten Tyldum should have made a documentary instead. Artistic licence is fair enough, and when it comes to biopics, I’m usually the first to say – more story and less Wikipedia-style recitation of facts please. One of the few scenes with any power at all is the dramatisation of the so-called Coventry Conundrum. In the movie, almost as soon as the first communications are successfully decrypted, our team of puzzlers can see from the positions of German U-boats that an Allied passenger convoy is in danger of attack. Before they can call this information in so that a warning can be issued, Turing stops them – pointing out that being able to break the enemy’s code is only valuable so long as they don’t know you’re doing it. Now, obviously, far more time would elapse before this dilemma was faced, and obviously decisions like this would be taken at a much higher level, but I don’t object to a movie condensing time and place and character like this, if the essential truth of the story is maintained (or, I suppose, if the false story is a helluvalot better than reality). This scene only dies a death ultimately because of the crass decision to have the youngest member of the team realise that – in a stunning coincidence – his brother is on that convoy, and start to blub. And thus a vital insight into the role of the code-breakers is reduced to maudlin and unlikely soap opera.

So I will take The Imitation Game to task for its lack of historical veracity, not because historical veracity is inherently a good thing, but because in this case the truth is far more interesting than the superficial nonsense paraded before us here. The film would have us believe that cracking the Enigma code was the work of one man, who in turn outsourced it to a prodigious machine which was the forerunner of the modern computer, and that the code when cracked required nothing more than the mechanical operation of the said computer. In fact, continuing to be able to interpret German messages was a laborious and on-going process which continued throughout the war, aided by Turing’s “bombe” machine (which he never called “Christopher” for fuck’s sake) and by other similar machines, including the Colossus which was the forerunner of the modern computer, but which Turing had nothing to do with.

The film would also have us believe that one genius was able to crack the Enigma machine, but actually in most respects the Enigma is a near-perfect encryption device, if used properly. The story of the defeat of Enigma is actually a rather more human story of operator error. Had the Germans been more aware of cryptanalysis, better trained or more disciplined, Bletchley Park would likely not have succeeded in deciphering their messages, machine or no machine. And that’s before we stop to acknowledge the Allied spies who managed to get a working Enigma machine back to Britain, without which Turing and co would simply have not known where to begin.

But none of this is of interest to Tyldum, Moore and co, who refuse to engage in any meaningful way with what Turing and co were actually doing, who let repeated platitudes sit where a theme should be, test our patience with five montage sequences (all on-the-cheap CGI unwisely mixed it with grainy newsreel footage), drown the worst of the dialogue with Alexandre Desplat’s sickly generic music, hope that the charm of the cast and their ersatz Richard Curtis-esque glib one-liners will carry us over the finish line, and if not, there’s always the sombre note of historical significance to give it a light seasoning of faux-profundity. How we laughed all the way to Awards Season. At this point I can’t even be bothered to be annoyed at the fact that the young cast don’t know how to pronounce “Euler” (possibly forgivable) or “ensign” (have they never watched Star Trek?), or that Turing’s school mathematics teacher stops in mid-proof (virtually mid-sentence) for the end, not just of the school day, but of the term.

The film can’t bring itself to depict Turing’s suicide, although Turing giving his team apples may be an allusion to his probable method of despatch. This scene is possibly the most outright ridiculous, where Turing – like an alien in a bad episode of Star Trek – asks Joan “what is ‘friend’?” and after she tries to explain, he awkwardly brings everyone apples and tells them a sort-of joke. Then they all stop despising and resenting him and start sticking up for him instead. Like you would. And we end with a reminder that Turing was pardoned in 2013 – a well-meaning gesture which had the unfortunate consequence of tacitly endorsing the thousands of other prosecutions for homosexuality in Britain.

Quite what the bloody hell this slack, lazy, syrupy, nonsensical farce of a movie is doing earning a nomination for Best Picture is anyone’s guess, but the nominations for Best Director and in particular Best Adapted Screenplay are completely ridiculous. The attempt to try and tie together Turing’s private life, mathematical game-playing, success as a cryptographer, philosophiser of mind and father of modern computing, while simultaneously devoting most of the running time to intrigue in Hut 8, was probably doomed to failure before it was even begun, even given that Breaking the Code had already done a pretty admirable job. Turing’s concept of a Universal Engine predated his work at Bletchely Park and the two have little to do with each other. His notion of the Turing Test, adapted from a party game called The Imitation Game, came after. This boring film has no room for either. It believes that it is comparing Turing’s keeping of secrets to The Imitation Game, but in the first place, this is an inapt comparison and in the second place, how could the naive audience member that the film is clearly aimed at be expected to work this out, given that the film never once tells us what The Imitation Game actually is.

Boyhood is certainly the most distinctive film in this year’s Oscar line-up, and in a year which includes Birdman, that really is saying something. In many ways, the two movies are polar opposites. Iñárritu’s film appears to have been shot in a single take, lasting the running time of the movie (although in fact there are numerous hidden cuts). Linklater’s appears to have been (and in fact was) shot over an extended period, lasting the amount of story time covered in the movie. Iñárritu’s film is stylised, surreal and metaphysical. Linklater’s is grounded, mundane and realistic. That they are respectively the most-nominated movie and the favourite for Best Picture says a lot about what a bold slate the Academy has put forward this year, in this category at least.

Before I sat down, I had some misgivings about Boyhood. A feature film cannot hope to sustain interest on the strength of its quirky mode of production, after all, and American coming-of-age sagas are not things which I generally rush to embrace. It’s not as if countless American sit-coms haven’t already given us the experience of watching young actors mature into gawky adolescents dozens of times before. The success or failure of Boyhood will thus rest on how interesting the individual segments are, and how well they cohere into a narrative – not on the fascination I might have with the decade-plus production schedule nor simply murmuring “my haven’t you grown,” each time we skip a few more months.

Strikingly, almost the first thing we see our three central characters doing is moving house. The family (six year old Mason, his mother Olivia and sister Samantha) moves three or four more times over the coming years/minutes and this gives the film a restless quality, always moving forward and rarely looking back. Early on Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) is the most engaging figure – quirky, precocious and funny. But she gradually cedes the film to Mason (Ellar Coltrane) who morphs from saucer-eyed little brother to shy pubescent to rangy, cynical young man while Mom (Patricia Arquette) tries to keep the family together.

Dropped into the mix is absent father Mason Snr (frequent Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke) who initially seems like a pretty standard-issue deadbeat dad, but as future stepfathers will confirm, actually has a bit more compassion and smarts about him than first appears. Linklater is amazingly adept at picking out items of early-2000s technology which perfectly date the film without any need to explicitly mark the passing of time.

Of course, as the chapters go by, it becomes impossible to entirely forget about the mode of production, but as well as gaining the opportunity to see characters gradually mature and change without a sudden and jarring change in actor or inch-thick prosthetic make-up appliances, the nature of the shoot also dictates how the story will progress. The impossibility of keeping a large cast together means that whenever the Mason family moves, they almost always leave the entire supporting cast behind, never to be seen again. This is disappointing, since the opportunity to reintroduce forgotten characters, now transformed by the passage of time, would provide not only more structure but marvellously truthful moments, inaccessible to other films.

The gradually evolving screenplay also makes it hard for Linklater to plant elements which will pay-off later on, and this manifests itself in part in a reluctance to let the human drama become too dramatic. When Mason and his buddies are messing around with dangerous weapons, or when his step-grandparents give him a shotgun, we already know that there won’t be a fatal accident, because it isn’t that kind of movie. When Olivia’s second husband flings a whiskey glass across the room, it almost feels like a scene cut in from a more conventional melodrama.

The pay-off for this soap opera is all Linklater, however. Following Olivia’s desperate rescue mission to remove her kids from drunken Bill’s sadistic control, Mason complains bitterly about being sent to a new school rather than thanking her for her selfless bravery. And this is one of the things which elevates the movie. As well as most of the individual episodes being interesting enough to sustain the interest (while mundane enough to suit the tone), the issue of point-of-view is fascinating. Arguably, this is Olivia’s movie. Sure, Mason Snr also does some growing up, but mainly it’s the tale of how an aimless single Mom working a dead-end job and bickering with her ex about child support, grows to become a much-loved and well-respected psychology teacher with two grown up kids who adore her and no need for a man to define who she is. But we keep missing bits of this move because we at least mainly see it through Mason’s eyes, and so when she unexpectedly bursts into tears towards the end, we realise that we’ve only been on the edges of this story – and that’s really what childhood is like.

I have to be honest, though, I didn’t fall in love with Boyhood the way a lot of critics did. If you took the events of the film and wrote a novel instead, you’d have little more than a rather thin and uninteresting short story. Mason and his family are just barely individual enough to be interesting. Take away the fascination with watching the cast grow older and you do still end up with something which is frustratingly generic. A less “scorched earth” approach towards plotting might have helped, but as noted I think that may have been inevitable.

What remains however was almost never boring (only when Olivia’s third partner also turns out to be a drunk who is mean to her kids did I feel as if the movie was repeating itself), and so even if this isn’t one of those films I will keep going back to, I am certainly pleased to have seen it and delighted that Linklater and co were able to pull it off.

The Oscars are almost upon us. The BAFTA nominations were announced yesterday, the Golden Globes are on Sunday and the cinemas are full of beautifully framed suffering and gurning, which will shortly give way to the usual fare of explosions and solid jawlines.

In the last week I’ve crammed in three movies, at least of two of which I confidently expect to see in the Best Picture nominees come 15 January, all three of which I shall review here.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

After the slightly tedious An Unexpected Journey and the unexpectedly elegant and engaging The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson’s sixth and final Middle Earth film is a rather ho-hum affair. Beginning almost immediately where the previous film left off (almost as if the material had been shot without anyone imagining there would a break of a year in between), the focus is all on Luke Evans’ anodyne Bard the Bowman who proceeds to almost immediately slay the fiery Smaug in exactly the way he said he would.

This brutally efficient, by-the-numbers style is the watchword for most of the film. After Gandalf is finally released from his “holding pattern” at Dol Guldur and after sufficient chat to bulk the thing up to a reasonable running time, the titular battle finally gets underway. Bonkers dwarf-king Billy Connolly is a bit of a treat and Richard Armitage’s mano-a-mano show-down with Azog works well, but the gigantic battle scenes contribute nothing we haven’t seen before and crucially none of the character drama really resonates, with Thorin’s re-emergence from “dragon sickness” disposed of in a few minutes with little more than a CGI pool of gold and a furrowed brow.

What’s particular disappointing is how little Martin Freeman gets to do. His performance was the saving grace of part one, the heart and soul of part two and his side-lining in the climactic instalment leaves the film without a happy centre. Still, I’d rather be him than, say, James Nesbitt who I swear gets two lines in the whole thing. A bit more Freeman and a lot less clumsy comic relief from Ryan Gage’s Alfrid Lickspittle would have gone a long way.

Birdman

One of the most bracing and exciting films I’ve seen in a very long time, Birdman deserves all the praise which is being heaped upon it. In a neat bit of self-referential casting, Michael Keaton leads as Riggan Thompson, Hollywood actor once well-known for his starring role in a series of extravagant super-hero movies, now attempting to show snooty Broadway theatre-goers that he is still relevant, talented and vital with a self-penned, self-directed adaptation of a (real) Raymond Carver story starring himself.

He is joined on-stage by his girlfriend Andrea Riseborough, a Broadway first-timer (Naomi Watts) and volatile supposed genius Ed Norton, gleefully following in Dustin Hoffman’s footsteps by playing up to his reputation as a difficult and demanding star. What sets this tale of desperation and personal need for fulfilment apart from the crowd is its casual attitude towards reality and the innovative shooting style deployed by director Alejandro González Iñárritu (that’s easy for you to say). Riggan is haunted by the voice of his musclebound alter-ego and appears to be able to – or believes himself to be able to – or fantasies that he is able to – alter reality with a single thought. Our first shot of him is floating in mid-air in the lotus position. He later apparently causes a light to fall on a recalcitrant fellow actor and later visits all manner of physical impossibilities on himself and objects around him.

While we watch these fantastic actors explore these great characters in this pressure cooker situation (I haven’t even mentioned brilliantly restrained Zach Galifianakis, an ice cold turn from Lindsay Duncan and a delightful cameo from Amy Ryan), Iñárritu’s camera swoops and circles and darts and dollies and never, ever (apparently) cuts.

The discipline of shooting the entire movie in a single take (although not in continuous time) makes it even harder to be certain about what is real and what is not, but this carefully calibrated ambiguity locates us inside Riggan’s head, as the camera crawls over Keaton’s panicky face, its sharp Batman contours now crinkled with a network of fine lines.

It’s not a perfect movie. I’ve had about enough of the cliché of real-acting-is-doing-it-for-real so when Norton starts drinking real gin on stage I rolled my eyes a bit – although, to be fair this is certainly on-theme. What’s much less satisfactory is Emma Stone as Riggan’s daughter who adds very little to proceedings, and when she and Norton start playing Truth or Dare on a balcony, the whole movie suddenly descends into after school special faux-profundity.

For the rest of its running time, however, the film remains bracingly original, constantly kept me guessing and even managed to pull off an obscure ending which doesn’t seem like a cop-out (it also includes a wonderful visual pun). Hardly stands a chance of getting the big prize, but surely it must be nominated – unlike the amazing percussion score by Antonio Sánchez which the Academy won’t even consider on the entirely spurious basis that the movie also includes some classical music.

The Theory of Everything

I don’t really like biopics. They’re very, very hard to pull off. Most non-biopic movies cover relatively short spans of time and those that attempt to work over longer periods need a great deal of discipline to find a central theme and hang on to it. When you are telling a true story of somebody’s life, there’s an apparent need not to leave anything out, so most biopics go from cradle to grave, with the result that we whip through key incidents and the overall effect is like reading a Wikipedia entry rather than being caught up in the reality of somebody’s life. Chaplin is possibly the worst example of this tendancy, The Social Network a particularly elegant way around the problem.

The Theory of Everything is blessed with an absolutely outstanding performance by Eddie Redmayne. Physically contorting himself like no other actor since Daniel Day-Lewis, he doesn’t so much impersonate Hawking as possess him. It’s sensitive, compassionate, funny, detailed, heartfelt and will surely win him Best Actor this year. It’s also a performance which the rest of the movie entirely squanders.

Telling the story of Hawking’s life means tackling at least three different narratives. The brilliant mind grappling with impossible problems of reality; the love story between young academics who don’t expect their marriage to last more than a few years; and the triumph-over-adversity story of a vital young man suddenly crippled by a life-threatening illness. It’s hard to pick just one of these and so my hope going in was that scriptwriter Anthony McCarten and director James Marsh would find a way of braiding these strands together which would somehow elevate all three of them.

In practice, the first story is all but ignored. There is maybe two minutes of science in the whole thing, most hilariously when a troupe of Cambridge post-graduates make a road trip to hear Christian McKay’s Roger Penrose deliver a lecture which would be elementary to a GCSE physics class, based on the thirty seconds we are allowed to hear. The life-threatening illness, brilliantly realised by Redmayne, is often the main focus but this is the least interesting strand being over-familiar in general from many, many similar movies and TV movies prior to this, but also because the details of Hawking’s condition are so well known.

And so, the love story forms the bulk of the movie, which is when the frantic skipping from scene to scene does the movie so few favours. Everything is trivial, glib, tick that box and move on. Why do we have to hear about Hawking bluffing his way through his viva at Oxford instead of taking the time to let that scene play out? Why do we jump from his first date with Jane to their wedding in the space of about ten minutes? Why do we never get a sense of who these two people are to each other, let alone as a couple? Hawking’s family is drawn efficiently and vividly, thanks in part to a lovely turn by Simon McBurney as his dad, but elsewhere the writer seems to be hoping that the cast will fill in the gaps and the cast seem to be hoping that the editing will fill in the gaps and the director seems to be hoping that enough stirring music will see him through.

How is it that a single film manages to be simultaneously so pedantic and yet also so coy? When we need to introduce possible cuckoo-in-the-nest Jonathan Jones (Charlie Cox, instantly forgettable), we can’t just show him giving piano lessons to one of the Hawking offspring, we first have to wheel in Emily Watson as Jane’s mum to laboriously explain to her that singing in the church choir is a Good Idea, then we have to have Jane creep mouse-like into the church just as the singing practice is conveniently finishing, then we have to have a lumpen conversation between the two of them – and so we exchange one telling, detailed, measured scene which would bring verisimilitude and texture to the story for three box-ticking snippets instead.

And yet at the same time, the film keeps eliding what’s actually interesting. The Hawkings’ sex life is included only by having Stephen and Jane embrace and then a cut to Eddie Redmayne cuddling a baby – not once but three times. And the potentially fascinating debates about the role of God in the universe are reduced to two quick mentions and one dinner table conversation in which C of E Jane is largely side-lined. That’s the other major problem with this film. Based on a book by Jane Hawking, it fails to realise that the story can’t be what is it like to be Stephen Hawking?, that’s largely unknowable in any case. But it could be what is it like to be married to Stephen Hawking? except that the filmmakers can’t bring themselves to cut away from their big-ticket item, the floppy haired one in the wheel-chair.

One particularly striking example is the diagnosis sequence. Hawking stumbles in the college quad, is taken to hospital where they perform a variety of tests and the young man is given his grim diagnosis. He returns to Cambridge and breaks the news to his bunk-mate Brian but when his then-girlfriend Jane tries to see him he refuses to talk to her. She is eventually given the news by Brian in a pub (we are not permitted to hear the dialogue).

But whose story is this? By never tackling this question, the movie is only ever able to give us the animated Wikipedia version, while steadfastly ignoring the colossally obvious point that every single fucking movie-goer is going to know the diagnosis before the characters do. If they had had the wit, the perspicacity – the fucking balls – to realise that this was Jane’s story, the whole sequence could have been played from her point of view. Her boyfriend has a mysterious fall in the quad but instead of just being patched up by the college nurse, he is taken away in an ambulance. In this pre-mobile phone age, she can’t get any information from the hospital, no matter how often she calls from the payphone at the bottom of her staircase. When Stephen eventually returns, apparently fit and healthy, he barricades himself in his room and refuses to talk to her. Imagine the confusion, the horror, the anger – and of course the ghastly dramatic irony because we, the audience, know all too well what’s coming.

What compounds all of these structural problems is just how fucking saintly everybody is. Hawking is unfailingly charming, funny, self-effacing and good natured – with the aforementioned brief strop the only moment where his disposition is anything less than sunny. Felicity Jones’s doe-eyed Jane is warm, supportive, patient, wise and deadeningly sincere, only leaving Hawking when he’s found flirty Maxine Peake to pal about with instead, and Charlie Cox’s Jonathan is essentially a tweedy martyr, tediously putting everyone else’s feelings ahead of his own. Where’s the vinegar? Where’s the tension? Where, for pity’s sake is the story?

At the fairly full cinema we saw this in, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a damp eye in the house. When a film dealing with a wheelchair bound genius whose marriage is falling apart can’t even be bothered to be mawkishly sentimental, let alone attain any real insight, power or emotion, you know it’s really in trouble. Lazy, boring and trite, if it were not for Eddie Redmayne, this would have been utterly ghastly. As it is, it’s just dull.

Now, that’s more like it.

Once again, with hindsight, what’s remarkable about Star Trek II is not so much that it set the template for the billion-dollar franchise which followed (although it undoubtedly did), it’s that Paramount was willing to make another movie at all. Actually, on paper that’s not so surprising. The film did make money – around three times what it cost to make – but it was hugely expensive. Disney’s The Black Hole, released the same year cost half what Star Trek The Motion Picture cost and it was Disney’s most expensive movie ever. But the reception from mainstream media and die-hard fans alike had been luke-warm. Did it really make sense to risk another forty million dollars to try again?

Enter TV producer Harve Bennett who confidently told Paramount bosses he could make five movies for the budget of the first one. After a year or two of script development going nowhere and staring down the barrel of a release date, Bennett sent for Nicholas Meyer who compiled a list of the bits-and-pieces people liked from the dozens of Star Trek II draft scripts and sat down to write the final screenplay, stitching all these disparate bits together, before beginning work on directing the movie, days later. These two men, neither of them familiar with Star Trek before they started work, saved the franchise, largely by completely and utterly ignoring the first film.

Meyer knew nothing about spaceships and future technology, but he saw the Enterprise as a sailing ship and Captain Kirk as Captain Horatio Hornblower. Ironically, Gene Roddenberry – who had by now been kicked unceremoniously upstairs – hated the naval paraphernalia and militaristic feel which Meyer gave to the Enterprise, but had himself used Hornblower has a frequent touch-point for the character of Kirk. Generally, Meyer’s reimagining of the Enterprise and Star Fleet through a naval lens works very well to create an impression of a colossal ship, manned by an enormous and active crew. Occasionally, he goes too far, such as when Kirk is literally piped aboard, or when photon torpedoes sit under hatches which have to be manually levered open, but these are tiny and easily-overlooked transgressions.

The whole look-and-feel of the film is vastly improved. The new uniforms strike the perfect balance between the colourful sixties jerseys and something which does actually resemble military garb, as opposed to pyjamas. They would still be in use for Star Trek Generations, a dozen years later. The bridge feels more like a submarine and less like the lobby of a futuristic hotel. The plot has the kind energy and drive so lacking in the first film, and the charm and humour of the characters returns, most noticeably in the early birthday scenes, but also throughout.

Despite – or possibly because of – the script’s mongrel heritage, it’s pretty much iconic scene after iconic scene. Playing into rumours of Spock’s death, Meyer apparently kills him off in the first five minutes as new crew member Lt Saavik struggles with the Kobyashi Maru scenario. Before long, Captain Chekov is facing down Ricardo Montalban’s fearsome Khan Noonien Singh, reincorporated from the original series, but that hardly matters.

Saaviki is also notable for actually making it to the end of the movie, but Paul Winfield as Terrell fulfils the usual role of doomed new cast member – in fact he does double-duty being both revealed as traitor and dying at the half-way point. Few of the rest of the cast get very much to do, but Bones gets a few choice lines and of course Leonard Nimoy gets to play a very real death scene at the end.

There are just a few moments where the film’s joie de vivre shades into smugness. On second viewing, it’s a little hard to understand just why Captain Kirk lets Carol and the rest continue to believe that they are trapped in the Genesis Cave with no hope of rescue, and the gag of the Reliant not bothering to look up or down in the final space battle in the nebula is a little hard to take seriously, but overall, this movie give us the space adventure we had so missed in the first film, and yet manages to be about something at the same time. Themes of age, decay, responsibility and obsession reverberate pleasingly throughout but never upstage the blood-and-thunder action and Montalban of course is an exceptional villain, gleefully chewing on Meyer’s theatrical dialogue.

What adds to the power of the film, and almost certainly secures its crown as the very best of the series, even thirty-odd years later, is that Kirk’s victory is so hard-won and comes at such a terrible cost. Spock’s death is meaningful, poignant and apparently permanent – three things it’s very hard to say about its karaoke re-enactment at the clumsy hands of Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and JJ Abrams recently.

Meyer might have cut back on the super-expensive transporter and warp drive effects, but he puts the money on the screen, re-using a few models and even model shots from the first film, and using then cutting-edge computer graphics to show the effect of the Genesis wave – a sequence which would become very familiar not only from its use and reuse in this film and its sequels but also as the iconic images for early eighties CGI in the movies in countless documentaries and behind-the-scenes TV specials.

Of course, as production neared its close, the whole cast and crew began to suspect that they might be on to a winner, and so rather than being the film that would shut the door on Star Trek, there was every chance that it might be only the beginning, and so Nimoy and Bennett hatched a plan to leave just enough of a thread to pull on if Spock needed resurrecting in Star Trek III – should that ever be made. This is done just gracefully enough that it doesn’t spoil the ending, and even that shot of Spock’s coffin on the Genesis Planet which enraged Meyer doesn’t bother me too much.

Pretty much perfect in every way, Star Trek II gave the series a future – without the Great Bird of the Galaxy who would soon turn his ambitions back to TV.

Facts and figures

Released: 4 June 1982
Budget: $11.2m
Box office: $97m
Writers: Harve Bennett, Jack B Sowards, Nicholas Meyer
Director: Nicholas Meyer
Producer: Harve Bennett

“You have your necessary illusions as well. But in your case they involve science. You don’t believe in magic but you believe in machines. So when he explained himself to you, he used your terms of reference. That’s the way a sorcerer behaves.”

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Opinions differ wildly about how much the current series of Doctor Who should be viewed as a continuation of what was started by Verity Lambert, William Hartnell et al in 1963 and how much it should be viewed as an entirely new series, like the Ron Moore version of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly this last point of view can only be taken so far, but it can’t be denied that structurally, tonally and in terms of its cultural impact, twenty-first century Doctor Who is a rather different beast than, say, the episodes produced at the end of the 1980s.

One way in which this difference is felt is at Christmas. While Christmas specials were a regular feature of UK TV, the nearest “old” (sorry “classic”) Doctor Who ever got was the misbegotten episode The Feast of Steven in 1965, sitting awkwardly in the middle of the lavishly bloody Daleks Masterplan. From 2005 onwards, however, Doctor Who has been the centrepiece of BBC1’s Christmas Day schedule, and these episodes are particularly tricky for whomever happens to be the show-runner.

Consider the constraints. First, it seems necessary to include Christmassy material. Second, it seems necessary to throw the tone lever away from “dark” and towards “romp”. Lastly, because the episode will have a wider and more diverse audience than usual, there can’t be too much mythology stuff – even when the episode has to introduce a new Doctor (The Christmas Invasion), write out an old one (The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor) or just tease us with the possibility (The Next Doctor).

Russell T Davies generally just threw the kitchen sink at the screen, an approach which sometimes paid off (Voyage of the Damned) and sometimes didn’t (The End of Time) but there’s no doubt that we allow greater leeway at Christmas. Steven Moffat has come at the problem from every conceivable angle. A Christmas Carol literally and avowedly glossed a festive classic, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe tried to do the same with Narnia and then fatally bottle it, The Snowmen attempted to reintroduce a new companion and an old adversary and of course The Time of the Doctor had to write out Matt Smith, and pretty much abandoned all the tinselly trappings after the first ten minutes and the name of the planet.

Now, with the whole series rejuvenated, a new leading man with an appealingly anti-Christmas demeanor, it was with some excitement, but also a little anxiety that I settled down to watch Doctor Who Meets Santa Claus.

What we actually got is on the one hand a mash-up of quite a lot of familiar ideas. Not just the Troughton-esque based-under-siege stuff, also referencing Alien, but also lots of Inception, a fair bit of Total Recall and quite a lot of previous Moffat scripts including Silence in the Library, The Empty Child and Asylum of the Daleks. But on the other hand, the most assured, sleek, uncluttered Christmas episode in years. Maybe since The Christmas Invasion.

The opening with Nick Frost’s genial Santa Claus is charming and funny, with great supporting work from Dan Starkey and Nathan McMullen – but entirely baffling and confounding. The sudden post-titles cut to the Arctic base doesn’t clear up very much, but quickly it becomes obvious what kind of game is being played here.

When the words “dream state” are uttered in a Steven Moffat script, it surely can’t be very long before some serious narrative rug-pulling begins, and its entirely to the credit of this excellent piece of storytelling, that the rug is pulled from under us again and again and yet we are never in any doubt about what the threat actually is. All that’s missing (and I wonder if it was ever considered) is a Back to Reality style episode in which Clara is made to believe that her entire adventure with the Doctor was all an absurd dream. The Doctor’s comparison of his own ludicrous mode of transportation with Santa’s magic reindeer is the nearest we get. Danny Pink returns, still adding very little and that bizarre, pointless double-lie at the end of Death in Heaven is written-out in a quick exchange, rendering it even more unnecessary.

The four members of Arctic Base Nameless are sketched in briefly but are well-differentiated (in the way that, say, the inhabitants of the acid mine in The Rebel Flesh weren’t) with only Michael Troughton not quite registering (why is he the only one not to make it “home”?). And the trick of having not to think of or look at the Mind Crabs is another in Moffat’s line of childhood games made horrific (bringing to mind not only “I’ll give you a pound if you don’t think of pink rats,” but also Douglas Adams’ Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal “A mind-bogglingly stupid creature which assumes that if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you”).

The whole thing clips along very merrily indeed with Shona’s attempts to undermine Santa’s reality (“I got a second sled”) a particular highlight. Moffat also proves himself again to be a master of the show’s meta-narrative with the elderly Clara a perfectly plausible exit for the character, even if neither the make-up department not the actor could quite pull off the transformation.

So, after the derivative A Christmas Carol, the half-baked The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, the impossibly saccharine The Snowmen and the flimsy nonsense of The Time of the Doctor, this is easily my favourite of the Moffat Christmas episodes. It’s easily worth four stars, but I’ll give it four-and-a-half because, well, it is Christmas after all.

I got into watching science fiction in the 1980s, and that was a fallow time for Star Trek. Unlike in America where the adventures of Kirk and Spock were on permanent syndication, in the UK I remember watching a few episodes on BBC2, and I remember reading one or two novels, but I didn’t really grow up with Trek the way some people did. When The Next Generation launched in 1987, I devoured it, and watching those episodes again, spiffed-up on blu-ray, the best of them have scarcely dated at all. What’s shocking is that TNG launched 27 years ago and still looks great, whereas 1966 Star Trek had already begun to look old and creaky after only 21 years when TNG began.

So, my affection for the old crew rests largely on the original films. I was just about old enough to want to go and see The Motion Picture when it first came out. I don’t remember seeing the next two at the cinema but I read and re-read the novelisations and I’m sure I saw The Voyage Home and all the rest on the big screen. There follows brief reviews and historical context based on recent re-watches of the movies on blu-ray.

A quick rant first of all. Buying and rebuying the same material is something I’ve grown accustomed to and made peace with. I’ve bought the James Bond movies four times now (VHS, DVD, remastered DVD, blu-ray) and I don’t rule out buying them again if consumer 4K ever becomes a thing. But it is galling to have had original director Robert Wise recut the first Star Trek film and supervise the creation of new special effects sequences for the DVD, only to learn that this work was only ever done at DVD resolution which means that the blu-ray release has reverted to the theatrical cut. Anyway. Some history…

With hindsight, it seems inevitable that a Star Trek movie franchise would be attempted but what’s remarkable is that it survived this shaky start. Gene Roddenberry, genius though he surely was, seemed incapable of learning from experience. The original pilot of Star Trek back in the middle sixties was rejected by NBC for being “too cerebral”. Roddenberry had pitched “Wagon Train to the stars” and had delivered a philosophical musing on the nature of freedom. He got a second chance and so the good humoured, action-oriented, show we (some of us) came to love was born. Yes, the original series had some strong science fiction elements, and some notable moral stances, but the audience was really there to see Bones tease Spock and for Kirk to hit people with both fists at once. Hurrah! At yet, The Motion Picture seems determined to revert to the style of storytelling which Roddenberry had conclusively proved there was no audience for.

The first Star Trek film had a troubled birth. The success of films like 2001 and Silent Running initially convinced Paramount (who now owned the rights) that a Star Trek movie would be a smash hit, and so they began pre-production but when script development began to hit the weeds, they decided that a new TV series made more sense and so “Star Trek Phase Two” began to gestate, with a few younger actors to round out the cast and to cater for the absent Leonard Nimoy and the expensive William Shatner. And then, with casting complete and sets under construction, the even greater success of Close Encounters and especially Star Wars reconvinced Paramount that the movie idea had been right all along. Nimoy was tempted back into the ears after director Robert Wise was told by his daughter that it wouldn’t be Star Trek without Spock.

Throughout this process, the notion of the Enterprise encountering God refused to go away – an early draft for the movie was called The God Thing and the story concerned a god-like extra-dimensional alien supercomputer and the eventual movie script began life as a Phase Two pilot script called In Thy Image which is basically the movie as released (even including the name “Veejur” corrupted from “Voyager”) but with a damp squib of an ending. And all this despite the fact that the original 1960s series had included countless god-like aliens including but not limited to Charlie X, Gary Mitchell after his encounter with the Galactic Barrier, the Squire of Gothos / Trelane and Gorgan the Friendly Angel. The Enterprise had even previously come across an Earth probe retrofitted by unseen aliens which now murderously sought its creator – Nomad in the episode The Changeling, hence the bitter joke that the first movie should have been called “Where Nomad Has Gone Before”.

Anyway, the whole bridge crew was eventually assembled, an end was found for the Phase Two script and Robert Wise was handed a handsome budget with which to shoot his epic adventure. Watching it now, what is at first immediately apparent is that this belongs neither to the tradition of Star Trek movies (not surprising since no such tradition then existed), nor to the tradition of the Star Trek television series, but rather to the cycle of ponderous, highbrow and above all beige science-fiction movies which Star Wars had only just brought to a decisive end – films like Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Soylent Green. Very little of the charm and good humour of the original series survives this earnest and plodding encounter, with Spock in particular a shadow of his TV self and Bones given very few lines which are anything other than strictly functional.

Part of this is the need to give new crew-members Decker and Ilia some room to establish themselves. They are the first in a long line of new crew-members introduced at the beginning of a movie who take screen time and lines away from the TV cast, but fail to make it to the end credits because they get unexpectedly killed half-way through / sacrifice themselves at the end / turn out to be working for the bad guys. But Stephen Collins is too stiff and annoying to really register as Decker and Persis Khambatta, although cutting a very striking figure, doesn’t really make much of an impression before her reappearance as a probe, which makes her fate considerably less shocking than it might have been. Compared to Nomad wiping beloved Uhuru’s memory (don’t worry, she got it back) this is weak sauce.

The other problem is that writers and director are both putting the emphasis in all the wrong places. I read and reread the novelisation when I was a kid and so when I rewatched the movie I expected the first Shatner scene to be Kirk negotiating the return of his ship from Star Fleet top brass. Actually, when we first meet Kirk, this scene is already presumed to have happened. Fair enough, by all means start in the middle, but we then have ten minutes of sometimes impressive, but sometimes ropey, model shots to get Kirk and Scotty over to the Enterprise. I’d far rather have five more minutes of my hero standing up for what he believes in than five minutes of dialogue-free effects work, no matter how stately.

In fact the movie seems determined to undermine Kirk at every turn. He doesn’t know how his own ship works, is shown up by subordinates, is helpless before Veejur, is disobeyed by Spock and generally does very little to earn his keep until the very end. A pretty poor return for such a heroic figure, and this is especially noteworthy when so few of the original cast are given anything to do. It even seems to go unnoticed that on the TV show, Sulu and Chekov used to alternate in the same job. Here, both Walter Koenig and George Takei get about half-a-dozen bland lines each and that’s your lot. I hope they got paid properly because this will only have added to their typecasting problems. I’m assured that Nichelle Nichols is in it, but I honestly don’t remember even seeing her. Oh wait, yes I do, because she’s been given a very unflattering Diana Ross “do”.

What is good then? Well, the sets are nice, if beige, although it’s a shame we spend so much of the damn movie on board the Enterprise. “Bottle shows” are an inevitable feature of year-round TV production, where an unusually expensive adventure is paired with a show which uses only the regular cast and standing sets to keep the average price-per-episode within the budget. But on a big budget movie, surely we could stretch our legs a little? And then there are those damn silly uniforms with their navel height buckles-with-no-belts and Dick Tracy style wrist communicators, scrapped like so much else, after this movie.

So, the film retains its reputation for being slow – not only do scenes drag on for ages, but whole sub-plots such as the wormhole are included as very obvious padding. And overall, it does nothing which the TV series couldn’t do in a third the time with better jokes and more colourful décor. The effects work is often top-notch for the time, with a particularly snazzy transporter and warp drive effect – both too expensive to ever use again – and of course we get that wonderful Jerry Goldsmith sig tune for the first time. And if you’re in the mood for something not quite as glacial as 2001 but not quite as mindless as Buck Rogers, then this will fill 132 minutes quite handily. But it doesn’t really have much to do with Star Trek past (save re-using a basic plot) nor does it really set the template for Star Trek’s future. Best thought of as a slightly wonky prototype, this film established the need, but much more work needed to be done on the fit-and-finish before it was ready for mass production. Much better films were to come, and some much worse.

Facts and figures

Released: 7 December 1979
Budget: $46m
Box office: $139m
Writers: Alan Dean Foster, Harold Livingstone
Director: Robert Wise
Producer: Gene Roddenberry

By and large, I’m a Christopher Nolan fan. I’m aware that Memento doesn’t entirely make sense but it was such an arresting and compelling device that I’m not minded to go back and try and pick it apart. All of the Batman movies are eminently watchable, with the middle episode being by far the best. Inception I thought was marvellous – a brilliant combination of eye-popping effects, bright performances, a few weighty themes to chew on, and an emotional story which didn’t swamp the narrative but which managed to hold its own against the noise and colour.

So, I sat down to watch Interstellar, at the BFI IMAX in a happy mood, but my overall impression, at the end of a lengthy run-time was disappointment. There is good stuff here, but key moments are flubbed, and crucially, the film doesn’t do for me what I’m pretty sure Nolan thinks it’s doing. It doesn’t stir my soul, it doesn’t mash my brain and it doesn’t even delight my eyes the way I thought it would. Let’s get into this. There will be some spoilers, but I won’t assume you’ve seen the film.

Firstly, the film borrows from earlier works with a magpie-ish zeal which makes Tarantino look like a hermit-like recluse who’s never seen a film in his life. Just off the top of my head, Nolan has stirred in chunks of Contact, Armageddon, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Gravity, The Right Stuff, Solaris, Disney’s The Black Hole and great dollops of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is the most damning comparison, but we’ll get to that later.

We open in a future world where an unspecified ecological disaster has created a crop blight, with the result that no wheat or barley can grow and so America (and we assume the world) is subsisting on corn. Given that we will spend only about a quarter of the film in this environment, Nolan attempts to avoid lengthy and tedious world-building. We are spared long professorial lectures about just what has happened and when (although long professorial lectures are coming, don’t worry) and instead just spend time getting to know Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (no first name is given) and his family including John Lithgow who is given absolutely nothing to do.

But Nolan fills these early sections with set-pieces which are either obvious set-ups for pay-offs which result later in the movie (Murph’s “ghost”) or obvious set-ups for pay-offs which never arrive (Cooper wrangling a rogue drone back to Earth). Meanwhile, back-story which might actually help, like whatever the hell crash McConaughey is trying to get over, is scarcely referred to again.

But this approach means that I’m still asking vital questions about what is happening down on earth after McConaghey’s mission, and struggling to believe it all. The story we are told about NASA – unfunded, unloved, a misfit band of scientists still toiling away in isolation – is totally at odds with what they have accomplished – building enormous ships capable of interplanetary travel and devising a plan to save the lives of thousands of people. And the last-minute recruiting of McConaghey on to the mission also seems profoundly unlikely, no matter how much gravitas Michael Caine brings to his long professorial lectures (see I told you).

Once we leave the planet, things take a turn for the better. The world on board the various spaceships is better defined, even if, again what we are told is often at odds with what we see. This is our near future where the need for better farming has caused society to turn its back on science (because how could science help with making food? – that’s crazytown) and yet, this same technologically backwards culture has created miraculous double-jointed robots with Genuine People Personalities of the kind we can barely dream of (but which are a staple of science fiction movie-making).

There are other niggles here as well. Filming partly with IMAX cameras means that the aspect ratio keeps jumping about, and Nolan keeps shooting the ship our heroes are in from inside or from a “camera” “clamped” to its hull (I’m aware this was all CGI). That means it’s absolutely ages before we get a clear idea of what the thing actually looks like. We also have to hear about and not see the earlier missions. Not having any visual reference makes it hard to keep everything straight, and it seems an odd narrative choice to have one last rescue ship following twelve earlier ships, three of whom might have found something useful. These ships can transmit “data” but nothing useful about what the planets are actually like. You know, like “hey watch out for waves” or pictures of the surface. And vital mission strategy decisions seem to be taken by the four astronauts on the fly instead of being figured out before take-off. I guess this distributes the exposition more evenly, but the movie’s bigger problem by far is that I’m struggling to believe any of it.

Much has been made of the scientific accuracy of the film, and Nolan in interviews has claimed again and again that his pet physicist Kip Thorne wouldn’t allow anything in which couldn’t be justified scientifically. However, Thorne also seems to know which side his bread is buttered as he is developing a nice side-line in Hollywood and I suspect has let a lot of nonsense past. In particular, the planet on which time passes more rapidly for those on its surface than for those in orbit around it. This is a perfectly fine science fiction conceit, but it has nothing to do with relativistic time dilation at all as far as I can tell. If McConaghey and co accelerated away from crew-member David Gyasi at near light speed and then returned, they could find he had aged 23 years while they had been gone only a few hours, but nothing like this actually occurs.

Gyasi meanwhile is gathering “data” from the black hole for years on end. “Data”, you see is what Michael Caine needs for his “equations” which will save the human race. In my screening, Gyasi’s 23 years of isolation and loneliness were greeted with sniggers, but really it’s the Michael Caine / Jessica Chastain equation narrative which is most derisibly thin. Chastain works hard to sell it, but is given nothing to work with. Her breezy optimism is preferable at least to Anne Hathaway’s relentless earnestness. In a film sorely lacking in humour, her character is a particular dead-spot, and her freakish features, accentuated by her pixie cut make her seem distractingly alien in a movie which is trying so hard to suggest but not quite say that there are Mysterious Forces Beyond Our Comprehension Somewhere Out There.

Still, the adventures on Waterworld are at least exciting, and the decisions the crew have to make next are a neat dilemma. Arrival on Iceworld with Secret Guest Star Matt Damon also brings fresh pleasures, and if Damon’s evil secret is a) blatantly obvious and b) his plan makes hardly any sense, well we can put that down to Space Madness. In fact, pretty much everything from Saturn to Gargantua is at least good, and some of it is great action adventure, thrilling-escape-from-death stuff.

However, in its final act, when the debt to 2001 becomes a crippling sub-prime mortgage and when the film imagines it is at its most poetic, lyrical and spiritual, I actually experienced it as thuddingly, ploddingly literal. It surely can’t have escaped the attention of many viewers that McConaghey leaves Earth a) with a massive unsolved mystery in the form of those NASA coordinates spelled out by “gravity” and b) through a wormhole theorised to have been constructed by friendly aliens and that there is bound to be some causal link between these two and that link is McConaghey!

But even if the link between the two was a surprise to you, it is just far, far less interesting than what happens to Dave Bowman through the stargate, and at the same time the “data” is a McGuffin that makes no sense at all.

The coda on board a space station heading for the stars also barely makes any sense and the impression I am left with is that Nolan has badly overreached himself. This masterly creator of epic adventure tales, who also delights in playing with memory and reality, has failed to effectively realise most of the various worlds his story takes place in, has failed to create a sense of awe and mystery which his story depends on, is at best weak when it comes to the father-daughter emotions which the plot depends on, and has a very misguided idea of how scientifically accurate the whole thing is.

But a lot of it looks pretty and there is a good bit in the middle with mountain sized waves and a fist fight on a glacier and a demented docking manoeuvre and Matt Damon.

Agh! So close!

Finales are tough, there’s no question about that, but after the lean, purposeful drive of part one, I had very high expectations for part two. Sad to say, while it delivered some excellent moments, Death in Heaven didn’t really work for me as a narrative, falling as it did into a pile of largely unrelated episodes; and it didn’t really work as drama because so little of it really resonated or indeed made sense.

Some of Steven Moffat’s recent work on the series has stretched the boundaries of narrative sense past visual poetry and into Dada-ist absurdism. The events at the end of The Name of the Doctor are basically incomprehensible nonsense, but everyone sounds so committed and the pictures keep whirling past the viewer’s eyes so fast, it seems inescapable that it all must mean something terribly important. I fear that this is an illusion and what we are actually watching isn’t storytelling, it’s – to appropriate a phrase from linguistics – image salad.

This has been largely kept at bay under Capaldi’s realm, with really only In The Forest of the Shite dipping into this kind of pretty-pictures-and-funny-lines-doesn’t-have-to-mean-much-just-let-it-wash-over-you montage effect. In the finale however, while nothing is quite as bad as the gibberish of the later Matt Smith stuff, there’s an awful lot which just doesn’t quite hang together.

Let’s start with that bizarre pre-titles sequence with Clara claiming to be the Doctor, which then segues into the titles, now sporting Jenna Coleman’s eyes in place of Peter Capaldi’s and putting her name first. With all the opportunities Clara has had to attempt the role of the Doctor recently, especially in the excellent Flatline, and given her dementedly absurd back-story, it’s clear that this is far more than a feeble lie intended to stall a plodding cyber-assassination. It would be gamesmanship of the most poisonous kind to redo the titles just for the sake of a completely pointless plot feint.

Well, it was a completely pointless plot feint, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a “fuck you” from Steven Moffat to the fans. The Next Doctor played the same stupid games but at least Jackson Lake’s mental confusion was integrated into the main plot a bit. Clara’s pretence is abandoned almost instantly and now it just feels like a retread of Flatline instead of a fascinating development of it.

Next, evil villains need an evil plan. Death in Heaven brings us two evil villains who presumably, between them, can muster at least one evil plan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. All the cybermen seem to want to do is plod around and cos-play at Iron Man (when they aren’t re-enacting the end of Carrie) and all Missy/The Master seems to want to do is make speeches. This is a significant drawback in what is supposed to be the great big dramatic culmination of 12 episodes of rollicking science-fiction adventure.

Outside St Pauls, things start briskly enough with Kate Stewart and Osgood marching up and taking control in a very pleasing way, and the notion of the Doctor on board Moffat One, forced to be President of Earth and take decisions for the whole human race is very striking and a logical progression from UNIT’s relationship with the Doctor in recent years. So – what will the Doctor do with this terrible power? Absolutely nothing. The Cybermen blow up the plane and the whole idea is completely forgotten about forever. You can essentially remove everything from Kate’s entrance to the Doctor’s arrival at the graveyard and you will have missed nothing essential to the plot.

It’s really not clear to me what is happening at these and other graveyards. Missy has amassed a collection of minds of the deceased (“software”) which she now proposes to turn into decant into waiting bodies in graves on Earth. But cyber-conditioning generally removes what makes people individual so the minds cannot be especially valuable, and they replace most of the flesh with metal, so the rotting corpses are going to be of little use. What they need is the great hunks of steel which make up most of the body, which Missy doesn’t supply and which just mysteriously finds itself six feet under after a brief downpour. So, anyway, Missy has created her metal army of obedient killers, who generally aren’t disposed to killing anyone today. But one is not so obedient. Danny Pink has come back in cyber-form but he still has his human memories and emotions, and apparently he’s the only one.

Why is this? Something to do with a button that should have been pressed, or not pressed, or sonic-ed or – I don’t know, look this is pretty unforgivably sloppy. To the extent that anything here makes sense, everything that happens once our four main protagonists are together in that graveyard depends on cyber-Danny’s disobedience, yet there is not one line to account for why he, out of countless billions of resurrected chrome corpses is the only one still in control of his faculties. Nobody else in love died in the last 48 hours across the entire world? C’mon, this is lazy, lazy stuff.

The Doctor is desperate to know what the cyber-army’s instructions are, and his moral dilemma with Danny’s emo-button is interesting, but when the light in Danny’s eyes goes out, he mysteriously fails to fall in line with the others and maintains his independence. Still, at least the Doctor now has the vital information he needs, so the horrendous sacrifice of Danny’s emotional life was worthwhile. No, it wasn’t. Danny doesn’t know anything and in any case, Missy is about to explain the entire plan anyway. All the Doctor had to do was wait two minutes.

And what is her ghastly, season-finale, earth-shattering plan? To give the Doctor an army. To make him the most powerful man in the… wait, what? First of all this is pretty thin stuff, dramatically. I do prefer my evil villains to have a rather more grandiose plan than simply Making A Point. And if their plan is just to Make A Point, it should at least leave a medium-sized trail of destruction in its wake (see The Dark Knight). But not only is Missy’s plan feeble, it’s redundant, because the Doctor was in the exact same position twenty minutes ago on-board that sodding plane.

Danny’s final speech contrasting the orders of a general with the promise of a soldier is, I suppose, the culmination of all this relentlessly repetitive soldier-talk we’ve had to put up with, but – and maybe this is just me – it didn’t feel like it resonated. The ending of The Big Bang is at least as nonsensical as the ending of The Name of the Doctor but the notion of the TARDIS being something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue is so beautiful that I just don’t care. Danny’s speech by contrast is less than the sum of its parts, an exercise in joining-the-dots, nothing more.

Better that I suppose than the ghastly necrophiliac resurrecting of the poor old Brigadier for a final Doctor Who hurrah. When you’ve got Jemma Redgrave on the payroll, you don’t really need to be constantly sticking her in Nicholas Courtney’s shadow – let her be her own character for christ’s sake and let us remember the Brig by watching Inferno or The Invasion.

Danny Pink, now inexplicably back in the Nethersphere, has the opportunity to resurrect himself with the aid of a magic bracelet, whose properties again make next-to no sense but I can’t bring myself to plod through the problems it presents. He selflessly offers the Iraqi sprog whom he shot in the face another chance at life instead, which is a scene which did have some power and resonance, finally. But this Noble Act Of Self Sacrifice strongly suggests that Clara is already pregnant with Orson Pink’s ancestor – either that or something is seriously screwed-up with the timelines. And then, finally we get the chance to resolve the ongoing Doctor/Clara relationship drama.

In an episode full of bizarre, incomprehensible plot muddle, this scene might just be the strangest. Both of these two people who have suffered so much, who have gone through so much together, are just purposelessly lying to each other for the sake of a cutely ironic bittersweet ending. Light years away from the power and raw honesty of their confrontation at the beginning of Dark Water, this is hard-to-follow, obscure and rooted in a psychology which I cannot begin to relate to or understand.

And then, Santa Claus shows up.

Well, what did I like? Actually, there is some good stuff here, among the debris. Once again, everything looks fantastic, with the colour grading in the graveyard scenes working particularly well to remind us of those oppressive clouds. Even though nothing that happens affects the rest of the story in any way at all, a lot of the stuff on board the plane works well, with Missy’s murder of Osgood probably a highlight, if you can stomach just how dopey she was to go over there. Not that it made a difference, as Missy was already free of her bonds at this point.

In fact, Michelle Gomez as Missy is pretty much the saving grace of this episode – funny, scary, mercurial and “bananas”, she’s a wonderful addition to the roster of actors to play the Doctor’s nemesis. I’m very keen for a rematch, hopefully this time when she’s thought of an evil plan.

And amid the whirl and flurry and nonsense of it all, Capaldi stands fiercely tall, a remarkable casting coup which has created an indelible version of this most flexible and yet most constant fictional character. For the season as a whole, I’m hugely pleased. For the final episode, I’m baffled and bitterly disappointed at the missed opportunity. The combination of Capaldi, Gomez and Coleman, plus a handful of stand-out moments means that this episode scrapes in with three stars.

So, here’s my run-down of Series 8.

Deep Breath, 3.5 stars, a bit bumpy but enjoyable enough

Into the Dalek, 4 stars, pushes all the right buttons

Robot of Sherwood, 2.5 stars, smug and silly

Listen, 4 stars, very well done, but a bit empty

Time Heist, 4 stars, less ambitious, but probably more successful than Listen, so it’s a wash

The Caretaker, 3 stars, shoddy production values and clumsy humour weigh it down

Kill the Moon, 5 stars, epic but divisive

Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, 4.5 stars, both basically perfect, but neither has a scene which can match the end of Kill the Moon

In the Forest of the Night, 1 star, even the title is wrong

Dark Water, 4.5 stars, fantastic take-off…

Death in Heaven, 3 stars, wobbly landing.

If anyone wants to know how in-line this is with fandom at large, readers of Gallifrey base who voted put these 12 episodes in a very narrow band of average marks out of ten from 6.89 (Robot of Sherwood) to 8.48 (Flatline) with In the Forest of the Night a significant outlier on 5.68.

The final ranking of stories according to this group is as follows (from best to worst)…

Flatline
Listen
Dark Water
Mummy on the Orient Express
Into the Dalek
Deep Breath
Death in Heaven
Time Heist
Kill the Moon
The Caretaker
Robot of Sherwood
In the Forest of the Night

And there’s almost nothing between the top four. So, my own views are broadly in-line with fan consensus, but I’ve availed myself of a wider range of marks and I’m considerably more enthusiastic about Kill the Moon and a bit less excited about Listen.

That’s it for Doctor Who until Christmas, see you then. Next week – Star Trek.

Dark Water brings up two themes which I’ve touched on before – two parters and plot twists.

The “aha” moment a viewer experiences when plot elements suddenly and unexpectedly collide is delicious. It’s one of the most exciting things which narrative can offer. I’m not talking about surprises, and I’m certainly not talking about shocks. Those can be fun too – the head under the boat in Jaws is justly famous – but that empty startle is not as rich an experience as the plot turn which suddenly causes a re-evaluation of everything that’s gone before.

So a twist is more than a surprise. You can surprise a viewer simply by withholding information. Nothing could be easier. A twist has to give you the feeling that you could have worked it out for yourself, and so the art that the writer constructing the twist has to, ahem, master, is to provide all the clues needed, but somehow disguise their true meaning.

Steven Moffat, for all his many and various faults as a writer, has always taken a particular pleasure in doing this, and no wonder for he is supremely able. But a really, really good plot twist doesn’t depend absolutely on catching the viewer out. Really, really good plot twists stand repeated viewing – and not just because you can experience again the visceral thrill of mainlining the shocking information, but because watching the pieces assemble is as interesting as seeing them snap together, and because the twist deepens and enriches what the story is really about – rather than sitting on top of the rest of the narrative, serving as mere decoration.

This episode includes three plot twists, deployed with varying degrees of success and spoiled in various ways before the episode aired. The death of Danny Pink, falling under the wheels of a stray automobile while having a telephonic heart-to-heart with Clara, does not count. Surprising, yes. Shocking, certainly. But using the term as I’ve defined it above, not a plot twist.

Clara’s next actions are nothing short of astonishing, almost psychotic. This most thinly-drawn of all major Doctor Who supporting characters since the revival somehow seems to develop an identity only when pitched in violent opposition to the Doctor. Look how quickly she formulates her plan, look how efficiently she puts it into action, look how well she knows the TARDIS and the Doctor’s habits. If Turlough had been this single-minded, Mawdryn Undead would have been one episode long and ended the series in 1983.

What follows is possibly the most dramatic, tension-filled, eye-popping Doctor and companion seen we’ve ever had – except possibly for the end of Kill the Moon of course. And when the last TARDIS key is gone, and it seems as if Clara has killed the series, or at least stalled it for a good long while – then we get plot twist number one. And in some ways, this is the feeblest plot twist of them all: it was all a dream. The lazy cop-out of lacklustre writers who paint themselves into a corner and then try and cliché their way out. But, a familiar device can still be made fresh. The ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil essentially uses this same cliché but in a way which is bone-chilling rather than cosy.

And the choice here does not – as we say in improvisation – cancel the events of the scene on the rim of the volcano. In fact, those events, as imaginary as they may have been, drive the entire narrative as well as providing us with another one of the great Doctor and companion scenes, this one full of compassion and tenderness. No, Clara, betrayal is hardly enough to turn even this chilliest of Doctors against you. Even I’m growing accustomed to your face.

It’s of course not even a surprise that Danny Pink ends up in the same version of heaven which we have been visiting periodically, although Moffat’s tendency to play fast-and-loose with logic returns here. Missy’s (we’ll come back to Missy) Nethersphere seems to be simultaneously in Victorian London, the command ship Aristotle in the far future, where and whenever Doctor Chang is from, and St Pauls in 2014. I hope that will be cleared up tomorrow night, but I frankly doubt that it will.

After a bit of narrative vamping which was not uninteresting, but could have moved a bit more briskly (we’ll come back to pacing) we get plot twist number two. The Dark Water of the title provides the perfect cover for an army of Cybermen. Now, this had been comprehensively spoiled by most of the print and on-line media, but I confess it still caught me out. Near the beginning I was wondering where the Cybermen had got two, but I wasn’t quick enough to put the skeletons in their display cases and the power of Dark Water together. And by having them bust out of their tombs and then march down the steps of St Pauls, Moffat manages to reference two classic Troughton stories in the space of five minutes, and director Rachel Talalay frames it all beautifully.

So then, finally, we get the identity of Missy. I don’t know if I would have worked this one out for myself or not, but lots of other people did and I’d already seen their guesses on-line, so the revelation wasn’t scrambling my brain, it was more – okay, fair enough. And it is fair enough in my view. Michelle Gomez is an excellent actor with just the right kind of nutso malevolence to make a classic Master. I have no problem whatever with her standing alongside Delgado, Pratt, Beevers, Ainley, Jacobi and Simm (don’t worry Roberts, we’ll call you). Does it open the door to a female Doctor? Yes, kinda, but the series has been referring to regenerative sex-change for a while now, so it’s not that big of an upset to me.

Sidebar – I am in general opposed to the idea of a female Doctor, but I reckon I could be convinced by the right casting. As Steven Moffat has said before, the way that writers deal with the fact that the story they want to tell is contradicted by an earlier episode, is by the powerful and secret ploy of Making Something Up. You can do what you like, ultimately. I can’t off-hand think of a woman who could do the job, but I don’t think I could have conceived of a 24-year-old pulling it off before Matt Smith was cast. You do have to get the right person for the job, and because I don’t think a black, 70-something, French, wheelchair bound actor would make a good James Bond doesn’t make me racist, ageist, Eurosceptic, disablist or anything else. Actually, now I come to think of it – Emma Thompson would probably silence a lot of doubters. As Doctor Who, not as James Bond.

And the episode builds to the traditional cliff-hanger ending – our first in quite a while. Moffat’s bean-counting proved that two-parters didn’t save any money and so he axed them after The Almost People. But the real problem for watchers of the show was never that stories were too short, it was generally the case that two-parters either had about enough material for 60-75 minutes of story, and so episode one was a lot of padding; or there was enough material for a full 90 minutes of story, but it was felt necessary to keep all the good stuff for part two, which was consequently rather frantic while episode one, again, was a lot of padding.

And the pace does slow once we reach the Nethersphere, but not disastrously so. And the finale has a luxurious 60 minutes to play out its secrets. So – it’s very hard to judge at this stage because a disappointing dénouement can sour happy memories of a suspenseful built-up. But in general, this series has been so strong – one or two ghastly lapses aside – that I’m going to go ahead and award it four-and-a-half stars and sit back and watch part two in a spirit of giddy optimism.

Oh dear, what went wrong?

It’s a pretty good test I think of any narrative work of art to ask yourself – what would happen if the lead character was not present? The answer here is: absolutely nothing. The Doctor and Clara are stripped of all agency and just left to spectate as the plot sorts itself out. It’s a dramatically inert climax to a tedious and impoverished episode which brings the recent strong run of stories to a grinding halt. I may not have liked Vincent and the Doctor – another script from a celebrity writer attempting to do something different with the format – but I recognised that that was a matter of taste and I could appreciate the craft in Richard Curtis’s script. This is insultingly poor as a piece of writing and the production creaks under the weight of the visuals that the script requires, just as reality creaks under the weight of those which are omitted.

To be fair, the central idea of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script is a cracker. Overnight a dense forest has sprung up and covered the entire Earth (including the oceans it seems, judging by the shots of the planet from space). To be equally fair, however, the veteran writer seems to have been so pleased with this that he’s knocked off early and gone down the pub.

Nothing about this works on any level. An idea as striking, as simple, as bizarre as this needs to be grounded thoroughly in reality for it to work as a piece of television airing in 2014. But right from the beginning, everything is a little “off” – and by the way, saying “fairy tale” with a hopeful expression doesn’t turn a badly thought through and poorly executed concept into a gem. First of all, school sleepovers in museums. Is that a thing? I don’t remember it ever happening to me. What’s the point of it exactly? Other than to surround the Doctor with yet another troupe of adorable moppets?

Once the first shoe begins to drop, we really start to confront the two different problems which this story has to contend with. The first is that neither on the script, nor the production level, is anyone really trying to make me believe this. What very few people we see react with mild puzzlement, or keep their focus on what’s right in front of them – or not, as in the case of Maebh’s mum. Surely, if this were to happen for real, there would be panic, outrage, pandemonium. At the very least, in the middle of central London there would be people. But the casting money having all been splurged on moppets this week, we are denied even token extras, and the dialogue doesn’t even try and hide this fact. All poor director Sheree Folkson can do is plonk some road signs down on location and keep doing lens flares and hope for the best.

Just on the basic level of individual incidents, nothing really works. It’s bad enough that between emerging from the museum and watching the plot sort itself out from orbit, the Doctor, Clara, Danny and the moppets just sort of aimlessly traipse from the TARDIS to the forest, back to the TARDIS, back out in to the forest again and so on. This kind of narrative vamping is fair enough in episode four of a 1970s six-parter, but in a 44 minute episode it’s just appalling.

But even when the story stumbles across a good idea, like having all the animals from London Zoo released and roaming the woods, the production can’t really make it work, and the script can’t be bothered to think it through. Once Danny has shone a light in a tiger’s eyes, we’ll never ever be troubled by any of those animals again. Yeah, and Guy Crayford has never looked under his eyepatch before today either.

The resolution when it comes makes no sense and is very easy to see coming. Both of these statements require caveats. I let Kill The Moon off the hook (controversially in some quarters) for its nonsensical science for two reasons: firstly, the rest of the episode was gangbusters and secondly, it did make sense on its own terms, just about. But the idea that a bunch of magic trees will protect Earth from a gigantic solar flare just like an air bag makes no sense at all on any level. It doesn’t make sense when I say it, and it doesn’t make sense visually. An air bag absorbs a force, because the air is in a, well, a bag. Bagless air doesn’t work nearly so well. That’s why cars don’t come equipped with safety air. But unburnable trees will just sit there as the fire rages around them. Just how will they prevent the local air temperature from shooting up. By creating excess oxygen? Like when you blow on the embers of a fire you mean? It doesn’t sound like it’s going to work and it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. And it’s very far from clear from whence the trees came – moppety voices? Tinkerbell sparkles? Homework doodles? Um, did I miss something?

And I saw it coming, which might just be luck. Any good plot twist needs to be hidden in plain sight or what’s the fun of it, and if you hide something in plain sight, a few people will be lucky (or unlucky) enough to see it coming purely by chance. But I can’t be the only one who noticed that with an enormous solar flare on the way and magic trees suddenly appearing, we seemed to be playing a game of Double Mumbo Jumbo. Isn’t it rather more likely that one of these things is the solution to the other? I got there about twenty minutes in.

And, as noted, the Doctor has nothing to do in the climax. Yes, he issues some sort of dementedly childish warning to the people of Earth to let the trees alone, which would have had a great deal more impact had it not been comprehensively shown how indestructible they were mere minutes earlier. Then he and Clara just sit back and enjoy the show – rather more than I did, it seems.

Of course, if a planet-killing solar flare were on the way, astronomers would have noticed and the world would already be in crisis mode. This is hinted at, but never properly explored when Clara says she knew but didn’t tell the kids. So – the end of the world is coming, and you aren’t going to prepare in any way, or discuss it ever, or mention it to your space alien wizard friend, you’re just going to carry on doing your job because… I don’t know how to finish that sentence, I’m sorry.

Clara’s “trick” of packing the Doctor away to life and freedom when it becomes clear that the end is nigh (because of the flare or the trees, or the sparkly forest fairies, or magic Maebh, or some other damn thing, I was past caring by this point) falls utterly flat as drama, because I just didn’t buy a single moment of it, having checked out from the reality of the programme some time earlier.

And then finally, just when this impoverished production of a tissue-thin story looked like it couldn’t get any worse, we get the final kick in the nuts. The utterly unearned, unbelievable, treacly, reappearance of missing sister Annabel. This moment is meaningless because I was absolutely not invested in that loss, and false because that’s not what happens when family members go missing, and it certainly isn’t what would happen if they were to suddenly and shockingly reappear. The brilliant French drama The Returned worked incredibly hard to show us what would really happen if a daughter or a sister, long thought dead, turned up out of the blue. To “season” an already over-sweet story with this extra dollop of syrup is utterly misjudged and pointless.

I really am struggling to find any redeeming features, but this is easily the worst of the season so far. Capaldi does what he can with the limited material (stripped not only of agency but good jokes – even the naive and sloppy Bobbins of Sherwood gave him a couple of decent one-liners), and Jenna Coleman continues to do good work, but the relationship story with Danny is starting to feel unnecessarily drawn-out now, and Samuel Anderson is hitting the same notes over and over again. Missing the sweet spot of grounded drama with a hint of fairy tale magic by absolutely miles, this was a story which Doctor Who’s budget could never have made work, which doesn’t entirely excuse all concerned from trying so little in its execution. Certainly the poorest effort since Journey to the Nadir of the TARDIS and maybe poorer than anything in the Moffat reign to date. One star. Bugger.